Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Luis Villa <luis AT tieguy.org>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Heather Morrison <hgmorris AT sfu.ca> wrote:
>>
>> I would also argue in favour of vagueness in some cases over clarity. 
>> Creative Commons is about sharing. The
>> concept of sharing is vague, and not understood the same way by everyone. 
>> This is true of all abstract concepts,
>> like love, justice, and peace. Some of our best work happens in the realm 
>> of the vague - this is the space for
>> expanding our thinking about some very important matters, such as sharing 
>> our work rather than locking it down.
>
> Copyheart-NC: ♡ Copying is an act of love, not money. Please copy,
> adapt and share noncommercially.
>
> Compare with copyheart.org
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Somewhere between 5% and 95% seriousness on each reply above; I can't
> decide toward which end.

Having just had a conversation last night about the need for a
WTF-Zero license to combat permission culture, I'm very sympathetic to
the notion that overly formalizing and ossifying licensing can have
detrimental effects.

But I think Mike's off-the-cuff response is, perhaps inadvertently,
the right one. Licenses/unlicenses like Copyheart are an important way
for us to experiment and challenge our settled expectations of what
free cultural licenses can or should do.

The core CC licenses aren't the place for that, though. They should
(and currently do) reflect settled expectations based on a decade of
CC's experience, and a quarter century of free software experience
before that. This license cycle clearly has been, and should remain,
about tweaking that based on concrete lessons learned, not radical
changes based primarily on hypotheticals.

I'd suggest that de-branded forks of the licenses are the right place
to start for this sort of serious experimentation and
norms-challenging. e.g., I'm semi-serious about the WTF-Zero license
(a for of CC-Zero for people who explicitly want to fight permission
culture); and clearly Heather is serious about a license that is
CC-like but with a different relationship to commercial use. This
appears to be permissible already, according to
https://creativecommons.org/policies. So maybe Heather and I need to
go off, write our (un)licenses, and come back for CC 5 in a decade,
with some actual data and experience ;)

[Disclaimer: I'm on the board of an org whose official policy is that
license proliferation is a bad thing. This is absolutely the correct
position overall, but if we're going to move forward with better
licenses, some experimentation has to occur. So, should anyone reading
this be inspired to experiment and write a license: please make sure,
before you experiment, that your license has an important and clearly
defined functional purpose that is significantly different from other
licenses, with license text that strongly supports that purpose, and
ideally with compatibility with other licenses so that the license can
be retired gracefully. We need experimentation, but it isn't a thing
to be done lightly.]

Luis